


You Are One of the Lights

by Lexalicious70



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 08:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14352201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexalicious70/pseuds/Lexalicious70
Summary: Missing scene from “A Life in the Day,” where Eliot, Quentin and little Rupert struggle on their own personal quests to pull their lives together after Arielle’s death.





	You Are One of the Lights

**Author's Note:**

> This is for “Build Your Own Quest,” The Welters Challenge, week one. Thanks to my BFF Jax for the beta! Comments and kudos are magic, and as always, enjoy!

**You Are One of the Lights**

By Lexalicious70

 

“Mama! Maaaa-maaa!”

 

The wail jerked Eliot from his sleep and he sat up, alert yet slightly disoriented. The feather bed he and Quentin had constructed together shifted at the movement and a small, distressed sound drifted up from under the patchwork quilts.

 

Eliot remembered how proud Arielle had been when she’d finished them.

 

The wail repeated itself and Eliot reached down to touch Quentin’s back. Even through the cotton-lined quilt, he could feel the collected tension in his lean muscles.

 

“Don’t, Q. It’s okay, I’ll go.” Eliot slipped from the bed and shrugged on a robe over his sleep pants and bare chest before padding barefoot down the short hallway. Rupert’s room had been added onto the cottage some four years earlier, after Arielle had joyfully revealed her pregnancy to him and Quentin. Back when everything was balanced, despite the mystery of the mosaic. It had been almost ten days since either of them had touched the tiles—stacks of them sat as they had been left since that afternoon, the top squares now covered with a fine coating of dust. The shovels they had used to dig the graves lay nearby, the edges of the spades dark with dried clay.

 

Eliot pushed the wooden door to Rupert’s room open to find the little boy sitting up in bed, his face shiny with tears. The crib Eliot had helped Quentin build stood in the corner, deep in the shadows, and Eliot dragged his gaze away from it.

 

 _Have to move that out of here. Sell it, dismantle it, whatever_ , Eliot thought as he went to Rupert and sat on the edge of the small bed. “What’s wrong, little man? Hmm?” He reached out to wipe tears from the boy’s face. The four-year-old boy sniffled.

 

“I want mama.”

 

“Sweetie.” Eliot lifted Rupert up and set him in his lap. “I know you want her. We all wish she could be here.” He spoke around a rising lump in his throat—while Arielle wasn’t Margo, she had possessed the same kind of determination Eliot admired so much in his best friend, and they had enjoyed each other’s company.

 

“Why did she and the baby go away?” Rupert asked, laying his dark blond head on Eliot’s chest. Eliot slipped his arms around the boy he had come to think of as his, even though he shared Quentin and Arielle’s DNA.

 

“Well, baby . . . I guess you could say that Fillory sent them on a quest. Do you know what a quest is?”

 

Rupert’s face scrunched up in thought.

 

“It’s like a trip?”

 

“Something like that. There’s all different kinds of worlds, Rupert, and something out there needed your mother’s light. And it sent your sister with her so she wouldn’t have to go alone.” Eliot kissed the top of the boy’s head. “Sometimes people don’t stay on the world they’re born to. Your daddy and I didn’t, and now Fillory is our home. But I can tell you that if your mother could have stayed here with us, she would have. Sometimes, when people leave their home, it’s not because they want to, but because something greater than we can understand say they must. Because they’re needed elsewhere.”

 

Rupert’s eyelids drooped.

 

“Papa Eliot?”

 

“Hmmm?”

 

“Will that greater thing ever take you or daddy away?”

 

_Don’t promise him. You fucking know better than that._

“It brought us here, so I think this is where we’re supposed to be. Right here with you.”

 

Rupert murmured a small sound that might have been agreement and fell back to sleep in Eliot’s arms. Eliot rocked him for a few minutes more, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to look at the empty crib nearby, and then set the boy back into bed. Rupert popped a thumb into his mouth and sighed around it before falling back into a deeper sleep, and Eliot covered him with a blanket before making his way back to the room he, Arielle and Quentin had shared for the last five years.

 

They hadn’t set out to be a polyamorous trio, but Arielle seemed to sense Eliot’s need for intimacy almost right away. She didn’t object to the relationship he and Quentin had formed in the nearly eighteen months they had spent alone and eventually she and Quentin invited Eliot into theirs. While he and Arielle were rarely physically intimate, he did enjoy watching her and Quentin spend their pleasure on each other. He also enjoyed waking up in a lazy, tangled cuddle pile with the two of them, his nose usually buried in Quentin’s long hair.  

 

Now Arielle and the baby were gone, both lost to a breech birth and massive blood loss neither magician could stop. With no doctor nearby and the baby—a daughter—stillborn, all he and Quentin could do was mourn and try to comfort each other and Rupert as well. Quentin was still in the throes of grief and it was all Eliot could do to get him out of bed a few times a day.

 

 _The beauty of all life,_ Eliot thought to himself as he got back into bed and slipped under the quilt. _How is this beautiful? Ripping Q’s heart out after he’s already been through hell? What’s this supposed to teach him, other than everyone he loves is going to be taken from him?_

Quentin made a small sound, bringing Eliot out of his thoughts. Eliot moved closer and drew Quentin to his chest, pushing his long, tawny hair from his face. His cheeks and forehead were sticky, and Eliot drew his fingers along his lover’s skin, murmuring a spell that left tendrils of bluish smoke behind, cooling the feverish flesh and cleaning away the residue left behind by Quentin’s tears and sweat.

 

“Shhhhh,” Eliot soothed the younger man as Quentin twitched and gave an indecipherable, anxious mutter. “Shhhh . . . Eliot’s here, baby.”

 

Quentin’s eyes fluttered open a moment later.

 

“El?” He asked into the darkness, his voice rusty with sleep and grief. Eliot nodded and rubbed slow, wide circles across Quentin’s back with one hand.

 

“I’m here, Q.”

 

“Rupert?”

 

“He woke up briefly, but I got him back to sleep.”

 

“I don’t know what to do about him, El.” Quentin admitted, resting his forehead against Eliot’s chest. “I don’t know how to explain what happened.”

 

“He asked me why his mother and sister went away just now.”

 

“Christ . . . what did you say?”

 

“That Fillory sent them on a quest . . . that there are infinite worlds out there, and one of those worlds needed Arielle’s light. And that the baby went with her so she wouldn’t be lonely.” The last word felt thick in Eliot’s throat and he swallowed hard. Tears stung his eyes and he closed them a moment, only to open them again as he felt Quentin’s fingers stroke his cheek.

 

“El . . . thank you.”

 

“For what? For telling your son some fairy tale instead of the truth?”

 

“ _Our_ son. And for helping me think of Arielle as a light.”

 

“People die, Q. But I think there’s a part them that always goes on.”

 

“Really? You do?” Quentin looked up at him. “I always assumed that—well—you’ve never been very religious. Are you saying you believe in heaven, El?”

“Fuck religion and fuck angel wings and halos.” Eliot scoffed mildly, finger-combing Quentin’s hair. “What I believe has nothing to do with any of that brainwashing tripe. I’ve seen enough time loops and alternate universes to know that not everything ends when we think it does.”

 

A sudden smile broke across Quentin’s face, the first Eliot had seen in days, and Eliot chuckled a little as Quentin threw his arms around his shoulders and hugged him tight, just as he had when they’d arrived in Fillory’s past and realized they had access to magic. They sat that way for several silent moments, and then movement at the end of the blankets caught Eliot’s attention. Something wriggled up between him and Quentin and Rupert’s blond head popped out. He nestled down with his face buried in Quentin’s shoulder, and Quentin rested a hand on the boy’s fragile, narrow shoulderblades. Both were asleep a few moments later and Eliot watched their chests rise and fall in tandem, connected by blood and biology and processes older than Fillory, older than magic. Those connections were healing them both, and while their grief would leave a scar, they would go on.

 

Their lights would continue to shine.

 

 _The beauty of all life_ , Eliot thought to himself before sleep caught up with him, gathered him into its arms, and bore him away.

 

_Fin_


End file.
